Madonna

Hard Candy Warners, £12.99

Portishead

Third Universal, £11.99

Monday sees the release of two of the biggest albums of the year, and they are both driven - in very different ways - by sex.

Madonna has spent a lifetime injecting sex into mainstream pop, and the cover of her new record says it all. Almost unchanged from her Like a Virgin imagery, there is the underwear, the big eyes, the hungry mouth. "Look at me," it screams, "I'm nearly 50 but I'm still hot."

The problem with Hard Candy, though, is that it is one of the least sexy records Madonna has made. Great music for Madonna has usually been the product of intense, one-on-one relationships with her producer, whether that be Jellybean Benitez, Lenny Kravitz or William Orbit. Here she has splashed the cash on urban music's A-list producers, from Pharrell Williams to Timbaland, but the chemistry just doesn't work.

The beats are tired and over-familiar: each producer sounds as if he is doing an impression of himself. Nor do any of these boys seem to have the emotional maturity to draw anything deeper out of a woman who must surely have something to say at this point in her life. Madonna sounds muted and lyrically guarded - sometimes even downright sad and lonely.

Most importantly, Madonna has always understood what makes a body want to move. Heartbeat and Dance 2night try desperately to evoke the joy of the disco, but it's too contrived to get you on your feet, and the whole thing falls flat.

West Country trip-hop trio Portishead, on the other hand, have spent their entire career trying to escape how sexy people found their first album, Dummy, a record that they surely never intended to be "music to make lurve to". In the mid-Nineties, it became the CD to slip on in the background when you were trying to create that special mood of deep, emotional connection.

I wouldn't advise sticking Third on for any amorous encounters. This album takes the band's trademark sound of fragile, anxious beauty and sticks a fence of barbed wire and broken glass around it. Slow breakbeats and slinky scratching have been replaced by industrial noise and twitching interference. Beth Gibbon's distressed siren call is no longer addressed to a distant lover but to a hostile, indifferent universe.

But underneath the dark, defiantly experimental atmosphere, there is a thrilling, seductive energy. Despite Portishead's best efforts to repel you, this is the sound of a band who have fallen back in love with music. They might be pushing it to the limits of easy enjoyment, but this record is an enthralling, even moving adventure.